Is Silicon Valley Losing Its Influence on DC?

Zoë Schiffer: Totally. OK. I need to shift us to a new topic because I’m already feeling quite depressed. This one is about outer space. So my first question for you is how do you feel about outer space, Jake? And would you go if you had the chance? Normally I would say, no, thank you. I’m not interested. But I don’t know after this maybe, yeah, take me to Mars.

Jake Lahut: Weirdly, I would probably be more comfortable going to outer space than doing deep ocean exploration. That could be a recency bias with the-

Zoë Schiffer: I was going to say.

Jake Lahut: … the Ocean Gate thing. But no, I was super into the, not just the Apollo missions, but Gemini and Mercury as a kid. I had a little beanbag chair in my house where I would pretend it was the capsule-

Zoë Schiffer: Oh, my gosh.

Jake Lahut: … that was reentering the atmosphere looking for all-

Zoë Schiffer: I can picture this perfectly.

Jake Lahut: Yeah. So huge Al Shepard, John Glenn fan. I love all that stuff. But I am also a rather large person, and I think the fitting into the vessel would be difficult.

Zoë Schiffer: Totally fair. I can’t 100% guarantee you would see this if you did find a vessel that could take you, but WIRED contributor Jorge Garay reported that a team of astronomers from Yale and Copenhagen recently discovered two galaxies colliding with each other. They have called it the Infinity Galaxy. And this finding is pretty exciting because it could be the first direct evidence of how really old supermassive black holes were formed.

Jake Lahut: Yeah. This is some interstellar type stuff, but it really does look like that sideways eight formation. And I found this pretty mind-blowing. Especially in our vertical video treatment of it, if you want to check this out on Instagram Reels. It’s rather mesmerizing, I got to say.

Zoë Schiffer: So the prominent theory of how they form is when stars run out of fuel and collapse under their own gravity. But with very old supermassive black holes, there wouldn’t have been enough time for the stars to get to that point. So this Infinity Galaxy supports another theory that they were able to form from dense clumps of matter, so no star busting needed.

Jake Lahut: At least for now, we are still discovering new things about science in the United States of America. And maybe that’ll continue, maybe it won’t.

Zoë Schiffer: Well, if not, AI apparently is going to step in and do everything for us.

Jake Lahut: DOGE can’t go out there and catch up to the James Webb telescope at least. No one’s catching that bad boy anytime soon.

Zoë Schiffer: OK. So our next story takes us back to earth and, honestly, back to the Silicon Valley elite of it all. Our colleague, Joel Khalili, reported that crypto firms are finally getting more access to banking. This is actually critically important and covers both of our areas of reporting, Jake, because de-banking was a core reason that a lot of the Marc Andreessen types in the world really soured on the Biden administration and went all in on Trump. So now we’re kind of seeing the fruits of that decision play out because under the crypto-friendly Trump administration, a number of US FinTech firms are competing to offer bank accounts to these crypto firms. But they still do need to follow the ground rules set by the partner bank involved, so there’s no fully escaping the traditional banking system. But curious on your take here given how critical this was to the last election.